Uveitis is a group of inflammatory diseases affecting the uveal tract, retina, retinal blood vessels and vitreous. Due to its complex etiology, various entities, diverse and lack of constancy in treatment, some patients can experience visual impairment and even loss. In view of the fact that blindness caused by uveitis is mostly incurable and occurs usually in young and middle-aged people, it accounts for an important part of blinding eye diseases and has attracted worldwide attention. With the continuous development of precision medicine, clinicians will face new problems and challenges in disease diagnosis, and further in-depth research is needed to explore more optimized and efficient diagnostic processes and examinations to improve the diagnosis of uveitis in China.
With high morbidity, branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) is a common retinal vascular disease in the clinic. Although the classic characteristics of BRVO have been recognized for a long time, the traditional understanding of BRVO has been challenged along with development and application of new imaging technologies, including the reasonable classification and staging of the disease, and the vascular characteristics at the occlusive site via multimodal imaging, etc. Thus, re-summarizing and refining these features as well as further improving and optimizing traditional imaging evaluation, can not only deepen the correct acknowledge of the entity, but also find biomarkers of prognosis of visual function, which is helpful to establish better diagnosis and treatment strategy. In the meanwhile, it is necessary that clinical characteristics of BRVO on imaging and the reliability of these imaging techniques are worth correct understanding and objective assessment.
Surgical treatments for macular hole and rhegmatogenous retinal detachment are the most common and principle procedures for vitreoretinal specialists. The surgical success rate reached 95.0% and above for vitrectomy, macular surgeries with ILM peeling, or local/total scleral buckling. However, the postoperative visual function recovery is nowhere near good enough. Specialists must pay more attention to the visual function recovery of those patients. Postoperative macular anatomical and functional rehabilitation for macular hole and scleral buckling procedures need a long period of time. At present, the postoperative visual acuity for macular hole depends on many factors, such as macular hole closure conditions, surgical procedures, microsurgical invasive ways, skills of membrane peeling, usage of dye staining, and tamponade material choice. It also depends on residual subretinal fluid under macular area for patients received scleral buckling. It is important for us to investigate these factors affecting recovery of macular anatomy and function, and thus develop some drugs to improve the macular function recovery.
The prevalence of diabetes mellitus in adults of China has reached 12.8%. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) accounts for approximately 1/4-1/3 of the diabetic population. Several millions of people are estimated suffering the advanced stage of DR, including severe non-proliferative DR (NPDR), proliferative DR (PDR) and diabetic macular edema (DME), which seriously threat to the patients’ vision. On the basis of systematic prevention and control of diabetes and its complications, prevention of the moderate and high-risk NPDR from progressing to the advanced stage is the final efforts to avoid diabetic blindness. The implementation of the DR severity scale is helpful to assess the severity, risk factors for its progression, treatment efficacy and prognosis. In the eyes with vision-threatening DR, early application of biotherapy of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor can improve DR with regression of retinal neovascularization, but whether it is possible to induce capillary re-canalization in the non-perfusion area needs more investigation. Laser photocoagulation remains the mainstay treatment for non-center-involved DME and PDR.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of blindness in the working-age population, and it is a key ocular fundus disease that needs to be paid attention to in the next five years according to the "14th Five-Year" Plan for Eye Health. Promoting the systematic management of DR and constructing the chronic disease management system are the key to the next step of national eye health work. It is necessary to further improve the management mode of the whole course of DR patients with chronic eye disease through the joint action of medical security system at all levels, including strengthening supporting policies of primary medical institutions, optimizing medical service mode and process, strengthening scientific education to improve patients' and doctors' disease cognition, and updating authoritative Chinese DR guidelines to standardize diagnosis and treatment. It is hoped that the low vision and blindness caused by DR in China can be greatly reduced after the implementation of the "14th Five-Year" Plan for Eye Health.
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a new and non-invasive imaging technique that is able to detect blood flow signal in the retina and the choroid within seconds. OCTA is different from the traditional angiography methods. The major advantages of OCTA are that it can observe blood flow signal in different layers of the retina and the choroid without injecting any dye, provide blood flow information that traditional angiography cannot provide, and enrich pathophysiological knowledge of the retinal and choroidal vascular diseases., which help us to make an accurate diagnosis and efficient evaluation of these diseases. However there is a large upgrade potential either on OCTA technique itself or on clinical application of OCTA. We need to fully understand the advantage and disadvantage, and differences of OCTA and traditional angiography. We also need to know how to interpret the result of OCTA. With that we could make a fast diagnosis in a non-invasive way and improve our knowledge of the retinal and choroidal vascular diseases.
The classical surgical operations for foveoschisis in high myopia are vitrectomy, artificial posterior vitreous detachment, removal of the pre-macular vitreous cortex, removal of the inner limiting membrane (ILM) and intraocular gas tamponade, with some minor variations on those basis, including no removal of the ILM or ILM peeling with preservation of the fovea area; with or without gas filling, long-term silicone oil tamponade, etc. All the procedures have achieved certain efficacy and the foveoschis can be fully or partially relieved and the visual acuity can be improved to different degrees. It is worthwhile to emphasize, the most common and serious complication of the surgery is the occurrence of full-thickness macular hole or even postoperative macular hole retinal detachment. To address the risk of such complications, a safe and effective outcome can be achieved in the majority of cases by using ILM peeling with preservation of the fovea area. For high-risk cases where the operator is concerned about intraoperative or postoperative macular hole, a long-term silicone oil tamponade without ILM removal is proposed to prevent the risk of surgery-related macular hole formation.
Refractory macular holes typically represent macular holes larger than 400 μm, macular holes in pathological myopic eyes or complicated with myopic schisis, chronic holes longer than 6 months, persistent macular holes after surgeries, and some subtypes of secondary macular holes. A routine pars plana vitrectomy combined with internal limiting membrane peeling yielded a lower closure rate and unsatisfying visual rehabilitation in patients with refractory macular holes, which raised concerns among vitreoretinal surgeons. This editorial reviewed the new upcoming surgical techniques which were reportedly to improve the anatomical and visual prognosis of major subtypes of refractory macular holes. Although with a great variability, these surgical techniques are based the following surgical strategies: firstly, to sufficiently unravel the epi-macular tractional force; secondly, to bridge the defect of neurosensory retina by tissue insertion or implantation and stimulate wound healing process; thirdly, proper tamponade of gas or silicone oil so that the surface tension can stabilize the inserted or implanted tissue and encourage closure of the holes. In conclusion, surgical strategies for refractory macular holes should be made after a comprehensive consideration and a customized design.
Pathological myopia, characterized by progressive elongation of the axial length and formation of posterior staphyloma, is accompanied by chorioretinal irreversible degeneration. It is also the focus and biggest challenge of myopia control and blindness prevention. For managing progressive early-onset pathologic myopia and myopic traction maculopathy, episcleral pressurization of macula is a practical option. It can be divided into posterior scleral reinforcement surgery and macular buckling surgery according to the presence or absence of operative top pressure ridge after surgery, both of which are different in terms of implanted materials, procedures and indications. The implanted materials, procedures and indications are different between the two. Under the background of soaring prevalence of myopia, it is necessary to modify and cautiously popularize the techniques of episcleral pressurization of macula to provide high level clinical evidence for management of pathological myopia.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR), which is a common complication of diabetic and the main cause of blindness, brings not only a heavy economic burden to society, but also seriously threatens to the patients’ quality of life. Clinical researches on the therapies of DR are active at present, but how to perform a good clinical research with scientific design should be considered with high priority. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is considered to be the gold standard for evidence-based medicine, but RCT is not always perfect. Limitations still exist in certain circumstance and the conclusions from RCTs also need to be interpreted by an objective point of view before clinical practice. Real world study (RWS) bridges the gap between RCT and clinical practice, in which the data can be easily collected without much cost, and results might be obtained within a short period. However, RWS is also faced with the challenge of not having standardized data and being susceptible to confounding bias. The standardized single disease database for DR and propensity score matching method can provide a wide range of data sources and avoid of bias for RWS in DR.